Recently reviewed shows in D-FW: The Baker’s Wife, Gidion’s Knot and more

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Stewart F. House/Special Contributor

Bill Jenkins (center) as Aimable the baker and Katie Moyes-Williams (right) as Genevieve the baker's wife with Lucia Welch (left) as Denise in a scene from The Baker's Wife rehearsed at PFamily Arts at Lakeside Market in Plano on Wednesday night, April 2, 2014.

Through April 20 at Jubilee Theatre, 506 Main St. in Sundance Square, Fort Worth. $18-$25. 817-338-4411. jubileetheatre.org.

Songs of longing, desire, sorrow and wicked fun — Ain’t Misbehavin’ has them all. And when the five-person ensemble launches into “The Joint Is Jumpin’” at the intimate Jubilee Theatre in Fort Worth, you’ll feel like jumpin’, too. The 1978 Tony Award-winning musical tribute to Fats Waller and other black musicians of the 1920s and ’30s is no stranger to Dallas-Fort Worth stages. While the current cast does not sport breakout stars — like Liz Mikel at the Dallas Theater Center in 2004 or Cedric Neal at Jubilee in 2008 — it does mine dramatic gold out of each lyric and melody under Akin Babatunde’s insightful direction. Cast members are at their best when they work together, bringing the heartbreaking harmonies of “Black & Blue” to full flower. The singing was uneven at the start of the March 29 matinee, but the company grew surer as the show progressed. It was like watching the performers take their own musical journey through the complex human stories they tell.

The Baker’s Wife never made it to Broadway. But happily, this 1976 musical by Wicked composer Stephen Schwartz has made its way to Pfamily Arts in Plano, where its lush score fills the intimate space with a welcome message: forgiveness. Joseph Stein of Fiddler on the Roof fame wrote the adaptation of the 1938 film, La Femme du Boulanger, which tells the story of a wife (Katie Moyes-Williams) torn between her older husband, a kind baker (Bill Jenkins), and a passionate young man (Zak Reynolds). A fine ensemble of funny, quirky, quarrelsome villagers in their small, provincial French town encourage the baker to forget her. But as the villagers fail to shake the baker’s love, they stop fighting and try to help the couple. The picturesque set, designed by the show’s director, William R. Park, is so enticing you can almost smell the coffee at the outdoor cafe. The live piano accompaniment by Mark Mullino may not provide the swelling tones of an orchestra, but it feels like the right, humble touch for a show about the many mistakes that can be healed through kindness and a resolve to do better.

Gidion’s Knot should be required viewing in a country where childhood depression is on the rise and suicide is the fourth leading cause of death for ages 10-14. Kitchen Dog Theater’s regional premiere of Johnna Adams’ play is set in an unusual place for such a taut, tense and alarmingly insightful two-hander: a fifth-grade classroom. A mother, Corryn (Jenni Kirk), shows up for a parent-teacher conference that the teacher, Heather (Leah Spillman), assumed and hoped had been canceled. As Corryn pushes the reluctant teacher for details on why her son, Gidion, was suspended, the story plunges into a tragedy that proves all the more awful for being all too familiar. Under Tina Parker’s astute direction, extraordinary performances by Spillman and Kirk, whose voices are charged but rarely raised, tease out the subtleties in the argument about how we teach, raise and, too often, fail our kids. Clare Floyd DeVries’ detailed classroom design tells its own compelling tale of smiling photos, cheery quotes and airbrushed versions of ancient myths, with the dark sides of these primal tales whisked out of view. Meanwhile the hands on the classroom clock on the wall move, a reminder of how inexorably our time to help our children ticks away.

The first line in Adam Rapp’s Nocturne shocks: “Fifteen years ago, I killed my sister.” As you squirm in your chair, you may find yourself wanting to look away from the nameless speaker, portrayed with tortured intensity by Drew Wall, as he leads you down his character’s dark night of the soul. You can’t. But your eyes may flit back and forth to a radiant child in a flowery dress, played with mute

eloquence by Tara Magill. She is the sister who haunts him, who will forever be 9 — her age when he was 17 and his car smashed into her, unable to stop due to a faulty brake. And you may think, as his words whip around the tragedy like a tornado that lifts him and the listeners to a place where you are afraid you will lose your bearings in a world of sadness that has no bearings, no bottom and no limit, is it too late to sneak out? Which is the question that hits the devastated speaker, his mother and his father as his sister’s loss fractures their family. Because grief does that. It makes you want to turn away from anyone who reminds you of how you will never again be who you were before your loss. It makes you want to close your heart, like a reflex to pain. The powerful message this intermissionless play sends is that the only way to heal your heart is to keep it open. Yes, it’s a tough show. You’ll be glad you didn’t sneak out.

‘ORLANDO’

Through May 4 at Stage West, 821 W. Vickery Blvd., Fort Worth. $28-$32; discounts available. Food service available 90 minutes before showtime, including Friday prix fixe specials with dinner and the show for $39 per person; reservations necessary. 817-784-9378. stagewest.org.

Orlando, Sarah Ruhl’s 2010 adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, is a play in need of a point. Ruhl’s inventive storytelling in this cleverly staged regional premiere at Stage West distracts from the central question in the tale of a man who lives 500 years and transforms from a man into a woman: Why? The direction and performances charm with technical virtuosity on a simple set where three ensemble players, Nick Moore, Stephen Rosenberger and Mark Shum, become everything from Queen Elizabeth to mysterious suitors and a car to Anastasia Muñoz’s proud, impulsive and passionate Orlando. Is it, as the novel has been described, Woolf’s love letter to Vita Sackville-West? Is it commentary on the different rights granted to men and women and the different ways they are perceived? Questions flit like fish under the surface. They’re easy to miss or, perhaps, overstate in a show that should be more concerned with what it’s trying to say than how it’s saying it.

There are six possible winners, and audience members get to decide which character takes the title role, in this exuberant, witty musical parody of beauty pageants. The contestants are men dressed as women, striding with bright smiles, high heels and a whole lot of makeup. Chris Robinson’s direction, enhanced by Suzi Cranford’s glittery costumes and Coy Covington’s sleek wigs, lets each gal shine, adding suspense to the question of who will win. While interest in beauty pageants has waned since the musical opened off-Broadway in 1991, it pokes cleverly at the still-relevant issue of how beauty-

product manufacturers profit from women’s insecurities. We could, however, do without the jokes made at the expense of Consuela Manuela Rafaella Lopez, a character who would be funnier without the implied stereotyping that her name carries.

Nobody can mock actors like actors. A six-person ensemble at Undermain Theatre socks it to self-absorbed performers in the regional premiere of We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915. As parodied by playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury, the naive performers know painfully little about the German genocide of the Herero tribe in what is now called Namibia. They’re preoccupied with who is playing the lead, coming up with a complex back story for the wife of a German soldier and asking why a white actress can’t play a Herero woman. Director Dylan Key masterfully blurs the line between performance and reality. But while Drury is right to question who gets to tell other people’s stories, the fact remains that there are too many stories, like this one, that we should but don’t know. In the end, it seems braver and more commendable to tell a story badly than not to tell it for fear of getting it wrong.

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